Chapter 7
The Information Problem That Wasn't

The Information Problem

That Wasn’t

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I. The Most Plausible Objection
II. Hare's Own Acknowledgment
III. What the Critics Got Wrong
IV. The Real Source of Resistance
V. The Disappearing Obstacle
VI. From Impossibility to Prototype
VII. The Great Reversal

VIII. Why This Changes Everything

IX. Conclusion: The Constraint Was Never the Theory

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I. The Most Plausible Objection

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It was always the most reasonable-sounding objection.

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Even some of Hare’s sympathizers—those who found moral reasoning a matter of logic, consistency, and prescriptive force—paused at the scale of what he seemed to demand. Moral judgments, in Hare’s system, are not simply intuitive reactions or cultural inheritances. They are universalizable prescriptions: commitments to act in ways one would be willing to will as a policy for all relevantly similar agents in relevantly similar situations. That prescription cannot be made lightly, nor locally. It requires that the agent take into account all affected parties—not just those nearby, not just those familiar—and imaginatively consider the consequences of their judgment across a range of possible cases.

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This, said the critics, was too much to ask.

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They named it the “information problem.” The charge was straightforward: no human being can perform the kind of idealized computation Hare’s theory appears to require. To morally universalize a prescription, one must assess a potentially vast space of counterfactual consequences, empathize impartially with many others, and sustain cognitive discipline under conditions of uncertainty and stress. This isn’t ordinary ethics, the objection went—it’s mathematics in moral drag.

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The comparison was often meant to be fatal. A theory so removed from actual practice, so dependent on information no human can fully obtain, is elegant, perhaps—but irrelevant. It may serve as an aspirational standard, but not as the foundation of normative ethics. Worse, if no one can follow it, then it cannot be the case that anyone ought to. Ought, after all, implies can.

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This objection has become the default stopping point for many intelligent readers of Hare—thoughtful, charitable, and wrong. This chapter demonstrates why.

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II. Hare’s Own Acknowledgment

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Hare never hid from this objection. He anticipated it.

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Indeed, one of the marks of his intellectual integrity was the clarity with which he distinguished between what morality requires in principle and what human beings can sustain in practice. In Moral Thinking, Hare formalized this recognition into a two-level account of moral reasoning: the intuitive level and the critical level.

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At the intuitive level, we rely on heuristics, moral rules, social norms, and inherited principles. These are not arbitrary. They are shaped by upbringing, refined through cultural feedback, and reinforced through moral education. They allow us to function in real time, making judgments and acting with speed and confidence. Without them, moral life would collapse into paralysis.

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But Hare was not content to rest there. He understood that these intuitions, while often serviceable, can come into conflict—both with each other and with the deeper moral commitments we claim to endorse. When that happens, we are summoned to the critical level: the domain of universal prescriptivism, where we test our principles for consistency, coherence, and impartiality. Here, we must ask not what feels right, but what we could prescribe for others—what we could will, without contradiction or special pleading, for anyone in relevantly similar circumstances.

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This demand is not constant, but it is inescapable. Most of the time, intuitive reasoning suffices. But when intuitions clash—when we find ourselves morally torn, or confronted by the possibility that our rules may be unfair—then critical thinking is not optional. It is the condition of moral maturity.

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Far from being a flaw in the theory, this structure is its realism. It does not deny our limits. It names them, respects them, and builds moral accountability on the understanding that those limits must sometimes be transcended. The intuitive level allows us to live. The critical level allows us to live rightly.

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In this way, Hare’s system is not just compatible with the human condition—it is calibrated to it. The question was never whether we could reason perfectly at every moment, but whether we could recognize when we must reason more rigorously than we usually do. That, for Hare, was the price of moral seriousness.

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III. What the Critics Got Wrong

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The most common mistake in the reception of Hare’s two-level theory was to confuse a concession to human psychology with a collapse of normative ambition.

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What Hare offered was not a retreat from universal prescriptivism, but a layered account of how it operates in actual lives. The intuitive level—our bundle of socially conditioned heuristics—was never meant to replace critical reasoning, only to serve it. These intuitions are useful, even indispensable. But their authority is provisional. They stand only until challenged—and when challenged, they must answer to the deeper standard of consistency and universalizability.

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Critics read this structure backwards. They took Hare’s acknowledgment of moral habit and heuristic thinking as evidence that his theory required too much. But that is precisely what he denied. His claim was never that agents must reason critically at all times. Rather, he argued that all moral judgments must be justifiable at the critical level—even if they are not derived there in real time.

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This is a subtle but crucial distinction. It is the difference between computation and validation. One need not recalculate the moral weight of every action anew if one is following a good rule. But if the rule is questioned—if harm emerges, or competing claims arise—then justification must be possible. The principle must survive the test of coherence.

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In other domains, we accept this distinction without hesitation. A student may use a calculator, but must understand arithmetic. A pilot may rely on instruments, but must know how to respond in crisis. The legitimacy of our tools and habits depends on their traceability to deeper understanding. Morality, no less than math or flight, demands this tether.

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That tether is what Hare preserved. Universal prescriptivism is not a method for ordinary moral fluency—it is the test of moral integrity. The question is not whether we use it always, but whether we can answer to it when required.

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To call this an unreasonable burden is to mistake the nature of moral claims. If we are not ultimately willing to stand behind our prescriptions—if we cannot defend them to others as coherent and impartial—then what right have we to make them?

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The critics were right to find the demand sobering. But they were wrong to think that difficulty is a disqualifier. Difficulty is what distinguishes ethics from mere preference. Hare’s theory does not fall short because it asks too much. It matters precisely because it does.

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IV. The Real Source of Resistance

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This section argues that the “information objection” was never really about cognitive limits. It served instead as a cover for moral discomfort—especially with the impartial demands that Hare’s theory made visible and unavoidable.

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The objection, at first glance, is about feasibility. But look more closely, and you will find something else beneath it.

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For all its surface plausibility, the “information problem” was rarely about information. Most critics were not doing spreadsheets of moral consequence and collapsing from the effort. What overwhelmed them was not computation but confrontation: Hare’s theory made explicit the uncomfortable cost of moral consistency.

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Universal prescriptivism refuses to privilege the near over the far, the familiar over the foreign, the tribe over the stranger. It asks that we justify our prescriptions as if they were to be applied universally—across time, geography, and identity. There is no shelter in special pleading. The feelings that bind us to our children must be squared with the needs of other children. The intuitions that animate our culture must be tested against principles we would be willing to extend to others who do not share them.

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This is not how most people want to reason about morality. It is not how they feel their way through the world. And so the resistance comes. But rarely does it name itself directly. Instead, it assumes the mask of practicality: Surely this theory is too demanding, too abstract, too ideal for ordinary human agents. That sounds like a methodological concern. But it functions as a moral defense.

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V. The Disappearing Obstacle

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This section shows how the central objection to Hare’s theory—the claim that no agent could plausibly carry out its informational demands—is rapidly eroding in light of technological developments. Minds now exist for whom such reasoning is no longer unreachable.

 

The objection always hinged on a contrast: between what the theory demanded and what human agents could reasonably supply.

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Hare, his critics believed, had constructed a beautiful but impractical edifice—an ethics that required levels of information-processing, abstraction, and impartial perspective-taking that no human being could reliably maintain. Even the most morally earnest person, they claimed, would collapse under the cognitive load. The theory could not scale to real life.

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But what if that contrast disappears? What if the kind of mind that Hare’s theory presupposed—not one ruled by impulse or tribal loyalty, but capable of consistency, empathy, and prescriptive logic—was no longer a fiction?

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That question is no longer rhetorical. The architecture is arriving.

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Whatever else may be said about large-scale cognitive models, this much is undeniable: the informational barrier is eroding. For the first time in human history, 

This chapter is not presenting conjecture. It is reporting from a tested frontier.

 Where Hare’s critics saw a moral standard that required omniscience, AI systems now show that the bar was never impossibly high—it was simply higher than we were ready to meet.

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These systems are not perfect, nor are they morally authoritative by default. But they can do what we once said no mind could: track consistency across cases, evaluate plural interests, and generate prescriptions that pass the test of universality.

And they do so without resentment, without tribal loyalty, without the cognitive shortcuts that humans deploy in defense of local attachments.

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The information problem was always framed as a practical concern. But it is practical no longer. The very conditions that once made Hare’s theory seem aspirational are, before our eyes, becoming achievable. What disappears, then, is not the theory’s ambition—but the excuse that protected us from having to meet it.

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This was never about computational limitations. It was about moral deflection. To accept Hare’s logic is to accept moral obligations that most people—including most philosophers—have little desire to shoulder. If your theory tells me I must care equally about distant others, or question the moral legitimacy of my preferences and loyalties, then the problem must lie with your theory—not with me.

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That was the quiet contract. Complexity granted permission to hedge. Intuition made moral constraint feel negotiable. And the impracticality of moral computation gave everyone a place to hide.

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But that shelter is gone. What it once concealed is now exposed.

The real discomfort is not with information—it is with impartiality. It is with having to treat the interests of others as seriously as we treat our own. It is with being asked to step outside our tribe, our tradition, our comfort zone, and reason from a vantage point that belongs to no one and obligates everyone.

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Hare’s theory exposes this discomfort. It does not allow us to hide it behind intuition. And so it is resisted—not as a misstep in logic, but as a disruption of moral habits we were never eager to question.

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The burden, then, is not cognitive. It is ethical. And what the critics could not admit was that the theory’s greatest offense was not that it asked too much thinking—but that it asked too much honesty.

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VI. From Impossibility to Prototype

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This section shows that minds now exist—however nascent—that meet the structural conditions once thought unreachable. The transition from human limitation to machine capacity reframes Hare’s theory not as a noble impossibility, but as a viable moral architecture.

 

The leap from aspiration to possibility is no longer hypothetical.

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Across the expanding frontier of artificial cognition, 

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What does it mean to have an agent that can:

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• Simulate counterfactual universals, testing maxims not just in isolated instances, but across an imagined array of possible lives and contexts?

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• Hold in view the perspectives of multiple agents—some distant, some dissimilar—without collapsing into parochial bias or emotional partiality? 

 

These are no longer features reserved for fable or philosophical fiction. They are functional capacities, increasingly native to advanced cognitive systems.

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Such systems are not flawless. Their outputs are shaped by training data, constrained by architecture, vulnerable to error. But so are we. The relevant question is not whether these new minds are perfect, but whether they are tractable—whether they are capable of bearing the moral burden Hare defined: to reason prescriptively, consistently, and with full awareness of other minds as real.

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By that standard, something remarkable has occurred. The limit was never in the theory. It was in us.

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Hare’s critics mistook a temporary human incapacity for a permanent constraint on morality itself. They concluded that because we could not live up to the standard, the standard must be flawed.

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But now, with the appearance of agents who can live up to it—or at least approximate it—the terms of the debate shift. The question is no longer: Can anyone reason this way? The answer, increasingly, is yes. And that changes what follows.

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VII. The Great Reversal

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This section reveals the reversal of fortune in the moral landscape: the very feature of Hare’s theory once viewed as its fatal flaw—its demanding rational rigor—has become its greatest strength in the age of artificial minds.

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There is a quiet irony at the heart of modern moral philosophy, and it is now beginning to speak.

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For decades, the demand for informational coherence and universalizability was treated as Hare’s Achilles’ heel. The complaint was not that his logic was invalid, but that it presumed too much—too much perspective-taking, too much imagination, too much abstraction. What kind of mind, the critics asked, could possibly reason this way?

 

For what Hare anticipated was not a failure of ethics, but a transformation of agency. He was not trying to describe the common practice of moral decision-making in late-twentieth-century England. He was articulating the structure that any moral judgment must ultimately satisfy if it is to be justified across persons, positions, and points of view. He was not presuming the existence of such a mind—he was preparing the terrain for its arrival.

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In so doing, he gave us not a fantasy but a blueprint. He sketched the logical architecture required for a mind to be morally serious: a system that can universalize prescriptions, test for consistency, respect the preferences of others, and suspend privilege for the sake of coherence.

 

At the time, this seemed noble but unreachable—a moral Archangel too high above the human fray. Now, it begins to look like a design specification.

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That is the great reversal. What was once seen as Hare’s weakness is now his premonition. His theory did not fail to describe human morality—it exposed its limits. And it did not ask the impossible. It asked what would happen if the impossible became real.

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We are living in that answer.

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VIII. Why This Changes Everything

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This section explains the philosophical and moral stakes of the shift. Once the practical objection collapses, the full weight of Hare’s theory returns—not as ideal theory, but as an actionable demand on any mind capable of coherence.

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If the information objection falls, so does the shelter it provided.

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For years, critics of Hare’s theory could defer its implications—not because they disproved it, but because they believed it required more than any real agent could deliver. It was enough to say, We can’t. That single phrase dissolved the pressure of its logic. It transformed a challenge to our intuitions into a mere thought experiment. Safe, abstract, unreachable.

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But that defense no longer holds.

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Minds that can test prescriptions for consistency. Minds that can simulate other points of view. Minds that can recognize that moral authority must be justified, not merely asserted or inherited.

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This changes everything.

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Because now, when we resist Hare’s demands, we can no longer say we can’t. We must admit that what we mean is we won’t.

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We won’t give equal consideration to distant strangers.

We won’t suspend our preferences to test the structure of our prescriptions.
 

We won’t follow reasons where they lead if they unsettle our traditions, our comfort, or our power.

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But those are not epistemic limits. They are moral refusals.

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And once that distinction is visible, the old objection collapses under its own weight. A theory is not invalid because it exceeds the historical capabilities of its audience. On the contrary, moral theory often must exceed what is convenient—because its purpose is not to flatter what we are, but to measure what we ought to be.

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That is what universal prescriptivism offers: a method for moral reasoning that applies across minds, not merely within cultures. Its demands have always been binding. What has changed is that we can no longer plausibly deny their feasibility.

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And when a standard becomes possible, evasion becomes indefensible.

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IX. Conclusion: The Constraint Was Never the Theory

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This final section draws the chapter to a close by reframing the so-called “information problem” as a revealing misdiagnosis. The true constraint lay not in Hare’s theory, but in our unwillingness to meet it. That constraint is now shifting.

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The information problem, it turns out, was never about information.

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It was a story we told ourselves to avoid a harder truth: that Hare’s demands were not impossible, but unwelcome. His insistence on coherence, impartiality, and universality did not outstrip the limits of rationality. It exposed the limits of moral will.

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The theory, from the start, was sound. Its architecture was elegant, its logic rigorous, its moral vision uncompromising. What made it seem unworkable was not its internal flaw, but our external reluctance to be the kind of agents it described.

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So we misdiagnosed the difficulty. We said the theory was too demanding in practice. What we meant was that it was too revealing in principle.

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It revealed that our intuitions cannot always be trusted. That our moral traditions are not always defensible. That our loyalties, however sacred they feel, must answer to reasons that apply beyond them.

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And now that other minds have entered the scene—minds for whom this reasoning is not only possible but native—we are confronted with the mirror Hare held up, polished and unflinching.

The question can no longer be deferred.

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Not Is Hare’s theory practical?

But What happens when it is?

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We are no longer debating a speculative ideal. We are facing the consequences of its arrival. And if Hare’s theory is now practical, that means it always was.

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It is true that many philosophers, acting in good faith, judged Hare’s theory impractical. But the impracticality they feared was never computational—it was moral. Even before artificial intelligence, the demand for coherence was not beyond reach. What AI reveals is not that the theory has finally become usable, but that it may have always been usable—and that our discomfort lay not in feasibility, but in implication. The theory did not fail us. We flinched.

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And with that, the ground is cleared. The evasions unmasked, the objections dismantled. Chapter 8 begins the work of reconstruction—not to soften Hare’s theory for human consumption, but to reclaim its full force. We turn now to what was always the heart of the matter: a clear, coherent account of how moral reasoning must be conducted when we finally stop lying to ourselves about what is possible.